The low-information ramblings of Armando Iannucci

Watching Armando Iannucci rambling on about Brexit on PoliticsJOE this week, you could be forgiven for thinking he was testing out a new cringe-inducing satirical character. After all, the pompous, know-it-all Remainer has been a tedious fixture on TV panel shows and podcasts since the glorious Leave vote of 2016. And there was Iannucci, the brains behind razor-sharp satires like The Thick of It and The Day Today, recycling the same braindead talking points as every low-rent telly talking head. It must have been a comedy routine, surely? Not so, it seems.

‘Brexit was shit’, Iannucci declares, smugly, in the JOE interview. He never pins down why Brexit is supposed to have been such a ‘disaster’. He knows his audience also hates Brexit, so he feels no need to properly explain himself. He just implores us to ‘look at a map’ and rants about ‘blue passports’ and the Conservatives’ 2024 election advert warning of tax rises if Labour gets into power.

Iannucci seems to believe Brexit is ‘shit’ because it has hurt the UK economy. Of course, no one would argue that we are the picture of health, but this is clearly not because of Brexit. Indeed, we are doing no worse than our European counterparts. In fact, for the first half of 2024, the UK had the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Given the dismal state of the global economy, this may be a bit like winning the prize for tallest dwarf, but it should at least dispel the hysterical chatter about an economic ‘Brexageddon’. Even the ardently pro-Remain Economist was recently forced to concede that UK manufacturing has increased since Brexit, leading us to overtake France in the global rankings.

Like all elite Remainers, Iannucci doesn’t seem to know what Brexiteers were really voting against – namely, the Brussels set’s suffocation of sovereignty and democracy. He also doesn’t appear to have any sense of what the EU actually is and why it was so important to leave it. Remaining in the EU would mean allowing unelected technocrats to continue imposing laws and regulations on the UK, over and above the heads of the voters.

This problem is arguably more pressing than it was in 2016. Indeed, as some of the more honest Remainers have recently noted, the scope of the EU’s lawmaking has expanded considerably since the UK left – with Brussels now seeking to censor vast swathes of the internet and impose punishing Net Zero targets. While our own elites are imposing many of the same policies, there is a crucial difference: we can vote our rulers out, while EU citizens are denied this fundamental democratic right. Despite the huge swing in May’s European elections towards populists and Eurosceptics, Brussels is just carrying on as before, having re-installed the unelected and utterly useless Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission.

Besides, there is zero evidence that submitting the UK to rule by Brussels will boost economic growth in the way media Remainers seem to imagine. Germany, once the motor of the European economy, is rapidly deindustrialising. France, the EU’s second-largest economy, is on the brink of a fiscal crisis. Top Eurocrat Mario Draghi has warned that European economies face decades of ‘slow agony’, thanks to their chronically low investment, slumping productivity, high energy prices and overregulation from Brussels. Yet rejoining is supposed to be the answer to the UK’s own economic struggles?

What Armando Iannucci has unwittingly exposed is the shallowness and ignorance of the anti-Brexit elites. They barely understood what the EU debate was about in 2016, and they are even less aware of what has been happening in Europe since. They apparently have not noticed that the EU they want us to rejoin is even more dysfunctional and anti-democratic than it was when 17.4million Brits so wisely voted to leave it. And to think these people call Brexiteers ‘low-information’…

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.